Your iPad is an arcade cabinet: the journey from joke to product

The iCade makes your iPad look and act like a small arcade cabinet, and Atari …

ThinkGeek has a great system to drum up free publicity: fill the site with "fake" products to get its fans drooling on April Fools Day, and then wait for the blogs to hyperventilate over the idea of actually owning some of the items. Last year one of the products was the "iCade," a dock for your iPad that added arcade-style controls and made the system look as it if were a tiny arcade cabinet. The reaction to the product was immediate: gamers wanted it.

ION Audio stepped up to the plate to create the device, and showed it off at this year's Consumer Electronics Show to a receptive audience. How did this all happen?

Ty Liotta, ThinkGeek's merchandising director, described the response when the faux-product was first shown to the public. "People would really like to buy it, and we have had many people e-mailing and requesting it be created," Liotta said. "Our customers know we have turned April Fools items into real products before, so they know there is the potential there." The last product to go from joke to reality was a sleeping bag shaped like a Tauntaun, complete with a fabric design that looked like guts and a lightsaber zipper that opened the bag.

ION Audio, the company behind the sublime Drum Rocker drum set for Rock Band, saw an opportunity. "In the case of iCade, which was [ThinkGeek's] 2010 April Fools product, we reached out to them and told them that not only was the idea a great one, but that it was something that we thought we could turn into a real product," Adam Cohen, Director of Marketing and Business Development, told Ars. "They were happy to work with us to make it a reality, and 9 months later, we showed the working prototype at CES."

The "fake" iCade

The actual product is shown at the top of this story, with the image near the middle being the original mock-up. A few more buttons were added, the graphics were adjusted, and the physical connection has been swapped out for Bluetooth. You slide your iPad into the case, sync the controller to the hardware, and you're ready to go.

"We're partnering with Atari, who has plans to build support for iCade into a large library of classic arcade titles, so that's a pretty great start," Cohen said when we asked about games that would work with the hardware. "For CES, they provided us with a build of Asteroids which included support for iCade, and my understanding is that it took them a matter of hours to include that support in the build they provided."

The system uses standard bluetooth keyboard commands, so anyone who wants to create a game that works with the iCade will have a simple time of it.

The iCade will ship in late spring or early summer for $100, and we're looking forward to getting one in our possession to do some thorough testing. Will we be able to mod the buttons and sticks easily? Will we see unofficial support for emulators on jailbroken iPads? This is a product with a lot of potential, and it would be a hell of a desktop toy for the office. We can't wait.